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October 2009

Oct 26, 2009

This just in from the National Association of Women Lawyers (who took it upon themselves to conduct yet another study doomed to have depressing results from the very start)--they've reached the "astounding" conclusion that women lawyers are "terribly underrepresented" in the upper ranks of large law firms.

Women play “a surprisingly small role” in the highest levels of firm
leadership. The highest governing committee at the average large law
firm is made up of only 15 percent women. Only about 6 percent of law
firms have women managing partners, a small increase from 2006, when
only 5 percent of the managing partners were women.

Say what? Good lord--really?!?! Why, I had no idea. Thank goodness NAWL conducted this study. Now that we know all about the gender disparities in the legal profession--now that they're documented--things will no doubt improve, right?

I don't know about you, but I'm not holding my breath.

And neither is Joanne Lipman, who wrote an amazing op-ed in the New York Times this weekend about gender and our culture: The Mismeasure of Woman.

If you do nothing else today, read this article. It sums up so many of my experiences and feelings about gender issues.

From the article:

The truth is, women haven't come nearly as far as we would have predicted 25 years ago. Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. And attitudes have taken a giant leap backward.

I never expected that we would be in this predicament. My generation of professional women took equality for granted. When I was in college in the 1980s, many of us looked derisively at the women's liberation movement. That was something that strident, humorless, shrill women had done before us.

We were sure we were beyond it. We were post-feminists. After all, we lived equally with men. We felt that when we took our place in society, issues of gender - and race too - wouldn't be a factor.

Back in college, my friends and I never even had a conversation about balancing work and family. We had never heard of glass ceilings. We didn't talk about sexual harassment - that was just part of life.

I continue to wonder how I glossed over these issues in my youth. I seemed to think that everything would magically fall into place. I was disdainful of stay at home mothers. Domestic duties were unimportant, simplistic and most certainly beneath me.

Somehow, I would achieve professional success and everything else would somehow, magically, work itself out.

Sadly, that wasn't the case. Running a home and parenting children actually take up time and energy.

Kids gets sick at the most inconvenient times--and never at the same time as their siblings. People who repair furnaces, plumbing and roofing tend to want to accomplish those tasks in the daytime, during regular work hours.

Another factor I never fully appreciated until I had kids: if my kids leave the house with uncombed hair, but they're with daddy, it's "sweet". If they're with me, I'm a horrible, unfit mother who doesn't care for her kids.

People never approach my husband to volunteer for school activities--they always approach me--even though I work full-time. And, if my husband makes an appearance as a volunteer at a school activity, it's unexpected and "cute". If I do so, it's normal and expected-- if fail to do so, I'm an uncaring, selfish mother.

It's not easy being a woman and a mom. We're all doing the best we can do. Which is why I loved the concluding paragraphs of Lipman's article:

Women do have a different culture from men. And that can give us some tremendous advantages. Women are built to withstand hardship and pain. (Anyone who has given birth knows what I'm talking about.) That's a big benefit at a time like this, with the unemployment rate at 9.8 percent and rising.

Women define success differently; for some it may be a career, for others the ability to stay home with children. They also define themselves differently. I'm in the unfortunate position of witnessing many friends and colleagues laid off over the past year. But the women are less apt to fall apart - and this goes even for the primary breadwinners - because they are less likely to define themselves by their job in the first place.

Certainly, when you look at the numbers, women have made tremendous strides over the past 25 years. But in the process, we lost sight of something important. After focusing for so long on better jobs and higher pay, maybe the best thing - the enduring thing - we can do is make sure respect is part of the equation too.

If we can change the conversation about women, the numbers will finally add up. And that's what real progress looks like.

Oct 12, 2009

When I was in New York City last week, I attended a preview of the Broadway show Oleanna. I was offered two free tickets to attend because of my blogging on this blog.

It's described at the website as follows:

OLEANNA has electrifying dialogue, blazing emotion and
an ending that will leave you talking for weeks. In this riveting
drama, a college professor and his female student become embroiled in a
war of words that takes a dangerous turn. As their serene campus
transforms into a battleground for justice, Mamet's explosive
masterpiece dares you to take a side . . . if you can.

It was an unbelievable performance. The setting was the professor's office and the only two actors throughout the play were the professor and his female student.

I only skimmed the description of the show prior to attending it, and when I first sat down, I thought that the professor actually assaulted, or at the very least, inappropriately touched, the student. So throughout the first scene, I kept waiting for signs of that to occur.

I thought the professor was very old school, and noted that he always used the word "he" as the default pronoun--a fact that I found to be annoying, but nothing earth shattering.

Throughout the first scene, the student and the professor had a strange,off kilter, slightly charged discussion about her poor grade on a paper. She was very intense, and he was quite distracted at first, but later became a bit excitable. But, he was never inappropriate--just a bit flaky.

So imagine my surprise when in the second scene, we learned that she'd brought charges against him before the tenure committee based upon their prior interaction in his office.

Ultimately, you realize that the student, who was involved in some sort of "group" that you never learned about--was arguably seeking to make an example of this professor, essentially ruining his life in the process.

First off, I easily identified with her outrage and anger with our culture. It is extremely frustrating to exist in a society where you are, by nature of your chromosomal make up, subjugated to the status of a second class citizen.

For example, until very recently, most medical testing was done on white men and only male symptoms of medical events, such as heart attacks, were studied or disseminated.

Womens' scores in musical auditions increased greatly once screens were put up between the musician and the grader, thus preventing the listener from knowing the gender of the musician.

Psychological studies consistently prove that test graders routinely provide better grades to essays believed to have been written by a male, while providing lower grades to identical essays with a woman's name on the top. For that very reason, I used to write my "anonymous" law school exams in block print, so that the professor would have a more difficult time determining my gender when grading the exam.

In Oleanna, it was clear that this professor was sexist. He talked down to women students, wasn't aware of his innate bias against women and preference for the male norm. It was annoying, but, all things considered, pretty harmless. He wasn't a bad guy.

He definitely could have used some enlightenment. But making an example of him--ruining his life, both professional and personal, was ridiculous and extreme.

Her outrage was understandable. Her target was questionable. Her methods were outrageous. In the end, the only person I sympathized with was the clueless, sexist professor.

Overall, it was a great show. Great acting and an intriguing and thought provoking dialogue. I truly enjoyed it. You should check it out--and you can save money by doing so:

According to a 2008 study of more than 1,500 law offices across the
country by the Association for Legal Career Professionals, the number
of minority partners among all law firms was 5.9% of the total, while
the number of minority women partners was 1.84%.

At 24 Charlotte law offices with 728 partners, 4.26% of the partners were minorities, while 1.37% were minority women.

At the same time, 33.3% of Charlotte law offices reported having no
women partners. That compared with 11.7% of firms nationally. Of the
cities studied, only Portland, Ore., had a higher percentage of firms
with no women partners, at 34.8%...

But these abysmal rates are not the fault of the firms. Nope. It's the client's fault:

Increasing the number of minority partners at firms is a particular
challenge in Charlotte, she says, because of the opportunities to work
in legal departments at large companies such as BofA and Duke.

“We lose a lot of lawyers of color and women to our clients,” she
says. “That’s where we in Charlotte in particular have some difficulty.”

Hmmm, maybe that's because the clients foster a corporate environment that encourages--nay requires--diversity and equality:

At Microsoft, for example, the software giant uses carrots such as
providing bonuses to firms that have measurably improved their
diversity numbers. And BofA requires its top 100 firms to disclose on a
quarterly basis how much of the bank’s work is being handled by
minority or women associates and partners.

Duke is considering sterner measures such as taking legal work away
from firms that don’t improve the diversity among their ranks.

Go figure. The women and minorities would rather jump ship than work at firms sitting on their laurels, relishing in the good ol' days and the good ol' boy network--resulting in zero women partners in 1/3 of the law offices in Charlotte.